This guide uses a very minimalistic and efficient approach. After a clean installation it takes my relatively old machine only 12 seconds to boot. From pushing the button to the xbmc home screen.
I'm running xbmc on a Asrock ION 330HT with 3GB ram and an SSD drive.

If you're an experienced Linux user you can probably skip to section two because the fisrt step is just a regular Ubuntu minimal installation with only the OpenSSH server as extra module.

You will need to use xbmc for the username of the installation. Otherwise the script won't work!

For this method of installation to work you need to have your HTPC connected to the internet! This needs to be a wired connection for now.

When the bootable image is written successfully to the USB drive close unetbootin without rebooting

Now you have a bootable USB drive containing the minimal installation requirements for Ubuntu 12.10 or 13.04. During the installation process the minimal installation will download more required packages. The advantage of using the minimal installation is that no more then absolutely required for you installation will be downloaded and installed. Resulting in a fast and responsive XBMC installation.

1.3 Installation

Every * stands for at least one installation screen in most cases

Take the USB drive and insert it into one of your HTPC’s USB slots

Make sure your HTPC can and will boot from the USB drive. You can do this from the BIOS of your machine. In most cases no BIOS adjustments are required. Most computers have an option to press a specific key at boot time which will give you a screen where you can select the drive you want to boot from.

Unetbootin has added a screen to your bootable USB drive from which you can choose different ways to start the Ubuntu minimal installation. Choose “Install” in this screen.

In the next screen choose your preferred installation language. Preferrabely English because that’s the language I’ll be using in this in this howto. You’ll be able to choose your preferred language in XBMC later on.

Choose the country you reside in (other -> Europe -> Netherlands in my case)

Choose your ‘locale’. This determines some predefined variables. For me the best choice is United States. The best option for you might be the one that’s pre-selected

In “Configure the keyboard” select “No” and manually choose the keyboard type you use (English (US) with Euro on 5 in my case)

Ubuntu will automatically configure you DHCP (ip address) settings. AFter this has succeeded you know you’ll have a working network connection. If the network has a working internet connection your HTPC will have access to it.

Enter the HTPC’s host name (I use “xbmc”). Make sure there are no other computers with the same hostname on your network. If that's the case... choose a different one.

Confirm the next two screens with Enter (Ubuntu repositories mirror, default is ok)

If you use a proxy server, please enter the proper configuration in the related screen. Otherwise skip this option by pressing Enter

Enter xbmc in the Fullname and Username screens! Using xbmc as the username is required! The script won't work if you choose a different one.

Choose a password. You’ll need this password several times later on so remeber it or write it down

Do not encrypt your home directory unless you really need to (impacts performance a bit in a negative way)

Confirm or change your timezone

And now for partitioning. To keep it simple I’ll asume you have one HDD in your HTPC and want to use it’s entire capacity. If not... google it . Choose “Guided - use entire disk”

Make sure you choose the right disk (not the USB drive)

Confirm to write the changes to your HDD with “Yes”

Now the installation will start partitioning your HDD and after that copy and download the absolute minimum of required files. This might take a little while.

When asked for management upgrade plan select “No automatic updates”, after which the installation process will continue for a while

In the “Software selection” screen only select “OpenSSH server” using your arrow keys and the space bar. PRESS ENTER TO GO TO THE NEXT INSTALLATION STEP. I’m choosing not to use Samba since we can access the entire machine remotely using SSH and SFTP with only the OpenSSH server. As minimal as possible is what I want! The installation will continue after you've press enter.

Confirm installation of GRUB to the “Master boot record” with “Yes”

Confirm that the system clock is set to UTC with “Yes”

When finished remove the bootable USB drive and press Enter to reboot the machine.

This script will only work properly on Ubuntu Minimal and Ubuntu Server installations! Do not use it on an Ubuntu Desktop installation because it will break stuff!!

The 12.10 version of this script will work on both Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04!

2. Automated Ubuntu preparation and XBMC installation

The script assumes you chose "en_US.UTF-8" as your locale! It might work if you chose a different one, but I haven't tested that.Please be patient during the installation process. Some elements will take some time to finish!

That's it. You should have XBMC up and running after the automatic reboot, with nothing installed that isn't absolutely required! This installation boots super fast (comparable with OpenElec, quite a bit faster then XBMCbuntu). It provides a very smooth XBMC experience because there are almost no extra processes running in the background. No more then required anyway.

Please let me know if you run into problems.

Loads of thanks to everybody who's been helping with debugging, suggesting and testing!

wsnipx has been helping me out with the ATI part of the script. Check out his guide to learn some more about the ATI related configuration

lightmd is a requirement for the xbmc-live package. Unfortunately lightmd has a lot of requirements we don't need. I'm looking for a way to reduce the amount of packages installed with lightmd.
If you know an alternative method, please let me know and I'll adjust the installation script and howto to it.

Even though some unnecessary packages are installed, this installation is very responsive. In my experience it's booting quite a bit faster then XBMCbuntu. And running smoother then OpenElec and XBMCbuntu.

Excellent tip thethirdnut! I've got it running. Had to figure some stuff out, but I got there .
I've created a new script to automate this process too. The start post has been updated. I've removed the manual method because it makes it look so damn complicated

Ok... audio is working now. I needed to add the xbmc user to the audio group. It took quite a while before I had that figured out.
I've made a lot of improvements to the scripts. I'm unable to test with an Ati videocard. If anyone is willing to provide feedback about an Ati installation? That would be very helpful.

As far as I've been able to test everything should run smooth now. The scripts could be a lot more comprehensive but it's pretty time consuming to test the scripts. So I've kept it as simple as possible.

That's exactly what I think the problem is. Requirements and paths change depending on the Ubuntu and XBMC versions. There is quite some information available regarding manual installation of XBMC on a dedicated machine using Ubuntu. But mostly it's about desktop installations running XBMC and especially older versions of XBMC and Ubuntu. I think it would be nice if such information would be part of the XBMC wiki.

I'm looking into integrating the installation script into the mini.iso installation and I want to maintain the script for different XBMC and Ubuntu versions. An advantage in this method is that the user is always using the latest Ubuntu, dependencies and XBMC version when installing. XBMCubuntu needs to release a new iso to offer the latest versions.

That would be great Ned! Maybe the Ati installation script should be tested by someone with an Ati video card before adding it to the wiki, although there isn't much that can go wrong since only two variables vary in the two scripts.

(2012-09-28 09:47)Bram77 Wrote: That would be great Ned! Maybe the Ati installation script should be tested by someone with an Ati video card before adding it to the wiki, although there isn't much that can go wrong since only two variables vary in the two scripts.

Installed and booted flawlessly on my box using an ATI RadeonHD 4800 series card. THANK YOU SO MUCH! :-)

Thanks for your great script! After evaluation of your code I would like to ask you if it would be possible to add a (selectable? or at least triggered by some -tokens) option to install the open-source ATI/Nvidia drivers instead of proprietary ones, just to hold the head up of the open-source concept high